Solid State Drives

Solid State Drives (SSDs) are great because they can store lots of data and have no moving parts. As a result you end up with a device that can retrieve information very quickly because it doesn't have to spin up and look for it the way hard disk drives do. The only limitation is that SSDs have a finite number of writes they can perform before their flash can't be written to any longer so the applications they are best for are ones that read loads of data but write very little. This is EXACTLY what most online games do being that they load data for various game areas, save their data to the cloud, and only write and save locally generally when there is a client software update (patches, oh the non-stop patches).

Watched my channel and noticed everything seems to load really fast? You've been watching SSDs in action! SSDs can make your old computer feel like new if you set the up the right way...

You can read more about it in PCWorld's article:

How to stretch the life of your SSD storage

Denigrating Gamers

Some people enjoy denigrating gamers as they consider us a safe group to disparage now that times have changed and there is swift and immediate punishment for maligning people for their race, religion or orientation. I just view it as ugly people looking for the current group they can be ugly to without consequence.

Jimmy thinks he's funny but in reality he's just a sad vestige of an old and dying media platform.

Jimmy may not like gaming videos but the gamers he heard from were correct (however colorfully they may have made their point), our media platform is the future and his is definitely the past.

Transcoding Computer 2

Recently I’ve been running into problems with video transcoding, specifically the amount of time it takes. We’re having so much fun that I routinely shoot about 3tb of video on a given play-day, but that takes the Transcoding Computer about 24hrs+ to chew through. There have even been a few days where the hard drives were filled to overflowing, so the 4tb capacity of the Transcoding Computer just isn’t enough. Mostly the fault lies with FRAPS which creates immense files than need to be transcoded to H.264 before they can be uploaded to YouTube. So I’ve been thinking of bringing another Transcoding Computer online!

It turns out I had another PC laying around that hasn’t been doing anything lately, a Gigabyte Brix A8-5545. All I needed to do was plug-in a USB harddrive that adds 3tb of storage and it’s ready to transcode!

This should alleviate the processing backlogs that have been building up as we have fun making videos so expect more craziness and a lot more of it!

This is a video of the Brix getting put together when I bought it a year ago: